Technorati stung by ad-friendly vibe

Technorati has announced its first acquisition in a deal giving publishers and advertisers fresh ways to make money from social networks and media.

Technorati, which claims to track 72 million blogs, has purchased news and content aggregation and ranking start-up The Personal Bee. Berkeley, California-based Personal Bee will be integrated with Technorati during the coming months. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Personal Bee accurately tracks trends in the blogosphere and - importantly - the "traditional" media, going beyond Technorati's blog and podcast domain. The deal potentially takes Technorati in the direction of advertisers by becoming more useful to those tracking trends.

Despite being considered a top blog registration and catchment area, Technorati has come up short on powerful search tools for the reader. Searches tend to return a mixed bag of results, varying from random to woefully unhelpful. This has led some to question Technorati's value.

Personal Bee founder and chief executive Ted Shelton joins Technorati as vice president of business development and will report to founder and chief executive David Sifry.

Shelton said one option now would be for advertisers to accurately identify trends across the entire media landscape, including blogs, and associate brands with them via micro sites.

Shelton said today's deal would accelerate Technorati's previous attempt to improve conversation search and tracking with Where's the Fire?

"Technorati has historically been a research tool heavily used by bloggers. Over the last year, there's been increasing focus on creating a destination for readers. Personal Bee helps accelerate that development of the site," he said.

The secret to Personal Bee is a set of filters devised by Shelton. Filters aggregate content from any source and use patent-pending algorithms to scan key words and phrases to identify and track hot subjects in the blogosphere and mainstream media. Filters also track what readers are consuming and tagging to provide a ranking, while Personal Bee users can promote or demote subjects. ®